This invention relates to an automatic music playing apparatus or a playerless musical instrument, in which tone information indicative of pitches, tone durations, rests, etc. and performance information indicative of tone colors, volume, vibrato, sustain, etc. are stored and read out for playing music automatically.
Prior art automatic music playing apparatus have memories, in which tone information indicative of pitches, tone durations, rests, etc, and performance information indicative of tone color, volume, vibrato, sustain and other effects with respect to the tone information are stored by operating a keyboard and switches. Such tone information and performance information are successively read out for playing music automatically. When writing such information in memory prior to causing automatic playing, data indicative of the pitch, tone duration, rest, tone color, volume, vibrato, sustain, etc. of successive tones of music are input one by one in the order in which they appear in the music score.
However, such input operation is very cumbersome. Particularly, it is possible that the input performance information such as tone color, volume, vibrato fails to match the image of the piece of music because it is difficult to grasp the whole image of the piece when the information is input.